iMessage

A sketchy rumor released Monday by the Israeli outlet The Verified claims that Siri will gain some interesting new capabilities when iOS 11 launches this fall. For starters, Apple’s personal digital assistant will tap into machine learning deeper than ever before to learn from user behaviors within the context of individual apps. Moreover, Siri will integrate with Apple’s iMessage service and sync data via iCloud.

Privacy is a big concern for a number of people, and one of the things that can be considered an invasion of this simple right is when people look over your shoulder to see what and who you’re texting.

A new free jailbreak tweak called MaskMe10 by RIshanan gives you some peace of mind by providing you with masking options for your incoming message notifications.

Admittedly, I have a love/hate relationship with read receipts. I like getting them, and I don’t particularly mind sending them to people, but sometimes I want to read someone’s message in peace without notifying them until I’m ready to deal with the consequences.

You could go into Settings and disable read receipts temporarily, but this becomes more of a nuisance than it’s worth. Fortunately, a free jailbreak tweak called Delay Read Receipts (iOS 10) by iOS developer HiDan helps by preventing read receipts from getting sent to your recipient until you’re ready.

Apple on Monday via its YouTube channel shared a brand new television commercial for iPhone 7, titled “Sticker Fight”. Much like its September 2016 “Balloons” ad, the most recent 60-second video takes another iOS 10 iMessage feature to the real-world: sticker packs. “Say it with stickers on iPhone 7,” reads the tagline. Apple also created a new App Store section where you can download all of the stickers featured in the ad.

Your phone is a communication tool, and sometimes you have to give your number out to people that you you’d never add to your contacts.

If you don’t want to get constant notifications throughout the day from people you’re not familiar with, you’ll be happy to know that you can configure your iPhone to suppress iMessage notifications from non-contacts. We’ll show you how in this tutorial.

Apple’s Messages app displays contact photos for each of your conversations by default on any iPhone with a display size of 4.7 inches or larger. Even if you don’t have a photo set up with some contacts, Messages will display a circle with their first and last name initials instead, just so you have something to look at.

This functionality, love it or hate it, can be toggled on or off by the user. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how it’s done.

Sometimes you cannot help but feel the iMessage App Store still owes us a couple of unique entrants to wholly justify its establishment last year. Games and stickers aside, the depth and breadth of the store leaves a lot to be desired and must-have iMessage extensions are few and far between. With that, it is always refreshing to welcome a new aspirant to the ranks that sets out to shake things up a little by bringing genuinely new functionalities to your keyboard. Vidicast, a video broadcasting app operating autonomously inside iMessage, does just that.

The iMessage application is best synthesised as a cross of any video broadcasting feature on the most popular social networks today (Instagram, Facebook, etc) and FaceTime. When hooked up, it provides the recipient of the iMessage invitation with a one-way live video stream, which then can be responded to in real time. The ambition of Vidicast is bold, bold enough in fact that one should be willing to give it some rope in regard to early days hiccups. Before you whizz to your iMessage App Store, here’s what you need to know about Vidicast’s attempt to break the mould of iMessage app extensions.

When Apple took the wraps off the iMessage App Store last year, it quickly became evident that the messaging service would become the next playground for some weird and wonderful applications. Since then, developers have largely graced us with conventional stickers and app extensions, despite another under-represented category increasingly showing promise: iMessage games.

Almost half a year after opening the gate, it seems a good time to take stock of the games playable through Apple’s messenger and hand-pick the ones not only most captivating but also smartest at circumnavigating the limitations of iMessage. If you fancy the thought of challenging a friend to a duel on iMessage but don’t want to waste anyone’s time trialling potential duds, read on to find out about the current top performers on the iMessage App Store.

Your iPhone is a tool of communication, so you might spend a lot of your time lurking in the Messages app. As you know, it’s just as dull as almost every other stock app on your device; plain and white. Since you spend so much time in the app, why not give it a makeover that could make you enjoy using it even more?

That’s where a new free jailbreak tweak called TranslucentMessages by AppleBetas comes in handy, as it takes what is otherwise a boring UI and gives it some fancy translucent visuals.

If you have all kinds of contacts on your iPhone or iPad, ranging from friends and family, to significant others, to business partners and bosses, then you have a responsibility to take extra care to ensure your messages never go to the wrong person.

Helping to prevent sending messages that are intended specifically for certain people to the wrong person is a new free jailbreak tweak called MessageFilter by Frozen Penguin. It works by allowing you to set up a special blacklist and whitelist system to manage where certain kinds of messages are allowed to be sent.

One of the things that really grinds my gears is when I get sucked into group iMessage conversations that I really don’t want to be in. Although rare, sometimes people do it just to wish a bulk of people a good holiday without sending individual messages, but other times people do it just to be annoying.

Unfortunately, Apple makes things even more difficult on you by limiting the ability to leave a group iMessage conversation to when there are four or more people in it, so if you’re being dragged against your will into a three-way iMessage conversation, then you’ll find the button to leave will be grayed out.

That’s where a new free jailbreak tweak called AntiSocial by Tony Kraft comes in handy, as it enables the “Leave this Conversation” button even when you’re in a three-way iMessage conversation.